The purpose of the present study was to increase our understanding of the relations among embarrassment, Theory of Mind (ToM), and emotion dysregulation in adolescents with Asperger's Syndrome and High Functioning Autism (AS/HFA), topics that have not previously been the foci of research in this population. The research sample consisted of 42 participants, split equally between adolescents with AS/HFA and typically developing (TD) adolescents. Participants with AS/HFA were matched with TD participants for chronological age and gender. Parents of all participants, typically mothers, were also required to complete measures. Participants were presented with vignettes of embarrassing or anger inducing scenarios, following which they were asked to provide ratings indicating the degree to which they would be embarrassed or angry in the protagonists' positions. Next they were asked to justify those ratings. Results indicated that the AS/HFA group experienced greater difficulty than the TD group with measures requiring ToM abilities. This was particularly true of embarrassment/social faux pas situations. In contrast, both groups performed similarly on measures involving anger-inducing situations that require less ToM. The significant difficulty of the AS/HFA group in understanding ToM in embarrassment measures was corroborated by their poor performance on an independent ToM measure. In addition to having significant difficulty in understanding embarrassment, the AS/HFA group was significantly less able than the TD group to recount personally embarrassing experiences. Regarding emotion regulation, participants with AS/HFA were significantly less able than their TD peers to regulate their emotions through reappraisal. Similarly, parents of the AS/HFA participants reported a significantly higher level of emotion dysregulation in their children than did the parents of the TD participants. Further, participants with AS/HFA had a significantly higher utilization frequency of negative strategies than their TD peers when embarrassed, which aligned with parent report. Negative strategies included internal, verbal, and physical self-injurious behaviors, as well as destructive interpersonal behaviors, e.g., falsely accusing, yelling at, or hitting others. These findings emphasize the critical and potentially harmful impact of embarrassing experiences in the daily lives of adolescents with AS/HFA.

The dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) has been implicated in a broad range of cognitive and emotional functions, including the processing of negative emotion. Furthermore, abnormalities in dACC activity have been associated with anxiety and depression, disorders in which negative emotion is dysregulated. Thus, a better understanding of the precise contributions of the dACC to negative emotion could give us important insights into the neurobiological mechanisms underlying these debilitating neuropsychiatric disorders. However, despite extensive study of the dACC, its precise role in negative emotion is unclear. Instead there is mounting evidence that rather than being one functionally homogeneous region, subregions of the dACC may have distinct functional roles. This evidence is largely correlational, and interventional studies in experimental animals are required to address this. Accordingly, the work in this thesis causally assessed the contributions of two spatially distinct subregions of the dACC (rostral and caudal) to the regulation of the behavioural and cardiovascular correlates of negative emotion in the common marmoset (Callithrix jacchus). These dACC subregions were targeted with indwelling cannulae to enable pharmacological manipulations to be carried out in a range of tasks, used to assess distinct components of negative emotion, such as conditioned fear and anxiety. The findings suggest that the rostral dACC and the caudal dACC do indeed have distinct contributions to the expression of negative emotion and the regulation of anxiety, respectively. Furthermore, an assessment of the anterograde projections of these subregions provides anatomical support for the observed functional differences.

This thesis explored the relationships between 1) Self-compassion 2) Cognitive Emotion Regulation and 3) Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and teacher stress in a foreign international school setting. The retrospective, multi-tiered study investigated a total of 177 expatriated teachers working in multiple international schools around the globe; at least 17 of whom indicated that they had completed a MBSR course. A mixed-methods approach was used over three stages utilising the following instruments: 1) an adapted stress impact survey, 2) Teacher Interview Protocol (TIP), 3) the short forms of the Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (CERQ-SF), the Self-Compassion Scale (SCS-SF), and the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS-4). Results suggest that teachers’ beliefs about stress correlate with job satisfaction; 82.6% of respondents who reported that stress has ‘hardly any effect’ also reported that they liked their job overall; whereas, 76.9% and 36.4% of respondents that believed stress had affected their teaching ‘some’ or ‘a lot’ reported liking their job, respectively. Results also indicate that higher perceived stress is strongly correlated with both 1) decreased self-compassion (r = -.491, p < .001) and 2) increased use of non-adaptive cognitive emotion regulation strategies, such as Catastrophizing (r= < 0.392, p < .001). All five adaptive cognitive coping strategies were positively correlated with Self-Compassion, four were significant; only Refocus on Planning failed to reach significance at p < .05. The data indicated no statistically significant differences between MBSR and non-MBSR participants, regarding perceptions of stress (PSS-4), self-compassion (SCS-SF), and eight of the nine coping strategies (CERQ-S), with the exception being that MBSR participants experienced reduced Self-Blame (p < 0.007). Conclusions find that policies and practices aimed at supporting the three aspects of self-compassion offer one possible avenue to reducing teacher stress and maladaptive thinking strategies, and thereby increasing job satisfaction, for teachers working in a foreign country.

La quasi-totalité des expériences émotionnelles font l’objet d’un partage social, qui se met en place rapidement après leur survenue et se fait majoritairement à destination des proches. Si, indépendamment de leurs caractéristiques (âge, sexe, culture,...) et de celles de l’événement en question (valence émotionnelle, type d’émotion,…), les individus sont si enclins à parler de leurs émotions à autrui, ce serait notamment parce que cela peut les aider à gérer leurs états émotionnels. Verbaliser ses émotions permettrait en effet à l’individu de mobiliser son entourage lorsqu’il est sous le coup de l’émotion et peu en état de gérer seul son état émotionnel. Cette mobilisation de l’entourage social permettrait de combler à la fois les besoins socio-affectifs et les besoins cognitifs suscités par l’émotion, via la mise en place de stratégies intrapersonnelles et interpersonnelles de régulation émotionnelle. Qu’il s’agisse de stresseurs de la vie quotidienne ou de stresseurs de forte intensité et négatifs comme dans le cadre de la pathologie cancéreuse, lorsque les individus parlent de leurs expériences émotionnelles, ce serait notamment parce qu’ils éprouvent des difficultés à les gérer et cherchent auprès d’autrui une aide pour les réguler. Parler de ses émotions ne serait toutefois pas bénéfique pour tous dans la même mesure. L’efficacité de ces stratégies serait notamment déterminée par le style d’attachement et les attentes qui lui sont liées quant à la façon dont autrui peut nous aider à gérer nos états émotionnels. La contribution du partage social des émotions dans la régulation émotionnelle est donc au centre de cette thèse, et a été abordée au moyen de trois études. La première étude a permis de mieux cerner le rôle de la verbalisation émotionnelle dans la gestion des expériences émotionnelles à travers la création d’une échelle d’évaluation des motifs allégués de partage social (Article 1). Cet outil, qui permet d’identifier les stratégies intrapersonnelles et interpersonnelles instaurées via le partage social, a été utilisé dans une seconde étude, visant à tester l’hypothèse selon laquelle les patients atteints de cancer partagent socialement leurs états émotionnels dans le but de mettre en place des stratégies de gestion des émotions, qui contribueraient à pallier leurs difficultés de régulation émotionnelle et favoriseraient à terme leur ajustement à la maladie (Article 2). Enfin, l’objectif de la dernière étude était de déterminer si les stratégies initiées via le partage social médiatisent le lien entre le style d’attachement et les difficultés de régulation émotionnelle (Article 3). Nos résultats sont discutés, et des pistes de recherches ainsi que des pistes d’application dans le domaine de la santé sont proposées. / Nearly all emotional experiences are socially shared, rapidly after their occurrence and mainly with close relatives. If, whatever their characteristics (age, gender, culture,…) and those of the event (emotional valence, type of emotion,…), individuals are so prone to talk about their emotions with the others, it would particularly be because it can help them to manage their emotional states. Verbalizing one’s emotions would indeed permit the subject to catch his/her relatives’ interest when he/she is under the impact of the emotion and hardly able to manage his/her emotional state alone. This mobilization of the close circle would permit to fit not only the socio-affective needs but also the cognitive needs the emotion gives rise to, through the initiation of intrapersonal and interpersonal emotion regulation strategies. May it concern current life stressors or high intensity and negative stressors, as it is the case in cancer, when the individuals talk about their emotional experiences, it would notably be because they have difficulties in managing them and as a consequence seek help to the others in order to regulate these experiences. However, talking about one’s emotions would not be beneficial for everybody in the same way. The efficacy of those strategies would notably be determined by the attachment style and the expectancies it creates about the way the others can help us to manage our emotions. So, the contribution of the social sharing of emotions in the emotion regulation is at the heart of this thesis, and was investigated by three studies. The first study has permit to better understand the role of the emotional verbalization in the emotion regulation by creating an evaluation scale of the alleged motives for social sharing (Article 1). This scale, which permits to identify the intrapersonal and interpersonal emotion regulation strategies initiated through the social sharing, was used in a second study, whose goal was to test the hypothesis that the cancer patients socially share their emotional states in order to initiate emotion regulation strategies, which would contribute to diminish their difficulties in emotion regulation and, as a consequence, to ameliorate the way they face the disease (Article 2). Finally, the last study aimed at determining if the emotion regulation strategies initiated via the social sharing mediate the link between attachment style and difficulties in emotion regulation (Article 3). Our results are discussed and research perspectives and clinical applications are proposed.

This study was conducted in India, and the research plan was initially developed to provide further knowledge and perspective to the rapidly increased issues of psychological conditions in the country, regarding alternative treatments such as yoga and underlying mechanisms in the effects of yoga practice. The purpose of the study was to examine if emotion regulation and rumination may act as mediators between yoga experience and anxiety respectively depression. The study included 320 participants from eight different indian cities, four of the cities located in the north, three in the south and one city in the western part of India. This study had a quantitative design and had a questionnaire as a method for the data collecting. The results indicated that both emotion regulation and rumination at a significant level mediated the relationship between yoga experience and anxiety and depression respectively. These results can potentially bring further knowledge for countries (and individuals) that have higher levels of anxiety and depression in their populations, such as India, by providing a alternative perspective in the treatment and prevention of these conditions. In addition, the results can be beneficial for individuals that suffer from symptoms of anxiety, depression, difficulties with emotion regulation, and rumination. / Föreliggande studie utfördes i Indien. Forskningsplanen utvecklades för att ge ytterligare kunskap och perspektiv till den växande problematiken med psykiska ohälsa i landet, med fokus på alternativa behandlingar som yoga samt möjliga underliggande mekanismer i effekter av yoga utövande. Syftet med studien var att undersöka om emotionsreglering och ältande medierar relationen mellan yoga erfarenhet, och ångest respektive depression. Studien inkluderande 320 deltagare från åtta olika indiska städer, fyra av städerna ligger i norra, tre städer i södra och en stad i västra Indien. Föreliggande studie hade en kvantitativ design och hade enkäter som datainsamlingsmetod. Resultatet indikerade att både emotionsreglering och ältande signifikant medierade relationen mellan yoga erfarenhet och ångest respektive depression. Dessa resultat kan potentiellt utöka kunskapen för länder (och individer) som har högre nivåer av ångest och depression i sina populationer, som exempelvis Indien, genom att ge ett alternativt perspektiv i behandlingen och i det förebyggande arbetet av dessa tillstånd. Vidare kan resultatet av studien vara användbart för individer som har symptom av ångest, depression, svårigheter med emotionsreglering, och ältande.

Emotion regulation has taken on a growing role in the study of psychopathology, both in research as a process, and as a part of a treatment. The interest in emotion regulation has led to an increase in the assessment of this construct, primarily with explicit measures of emotion regulation. However, explicit measures are limited in that they are retrospective, subject to response biases, and impacted by method effects. Further, explicit measures only assess single strategies of emotion regulation at a time. Implicit measures of emotion regulation are not subject to these limitations. One implicit measure of emotion regulation is Etkin’s Emotional Conflict Task, which conceptually follows the Stroop task. The current study utilized the Emotional Conflict Task, but examined psychopathology dimensionally instead of categorically. This allowed for more precise assessment of psychopathology and increased statistical power, without the loss of information inherent to categorical assessment. Until now, the Emotional Conflict Task has only been examined in a few clinical samples, and only with very small sample sizes. This study examined convergent and divergent validity of the Emotional Conflict Task as well as incremental validity over current measures of emotion regulation. Sixty outpatients with anxiety and mood disorders completed the Emotional Conflict Task and a standard battery of questionnaires, along with a semi-structured diagnostic assessment, as part of their intake assessment when presenting for assessment and treatment at the Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders. Convergent validity of the Emotional Conflict Task was assessed by correlating it with two explicit measures of emotion regulation. Next, hierarchical regression was used to examine incremental validity of the Emotional Conflict Task, specifically the amount of variability in functional impairment accounted for, as measured by the Work and Social Adjustment Scale. Finally, this measure was correlated with dimensional measures of psychopathology and temperament to assess the differential relations between these constructs. Results indicated that the Emotional Conflict Task did not correlate with explicit measures of emotion regulation, was not predictive of functional impairment, and was not correlated with dimensional measures of psychopathology or temperament. Potential causes for these null findings and future directions are discussed.

This study further defines the relationship between difficulties in emotion regulation and problem eating behavior. A total of 403 psychology undergraduate students completed measures of emotion regulation, disordered eating patterns, depression, and anxiety. Results from correlational and regression analyses suggest that difficulties in emotion regulation are related to problem eating behavior (r = .360, p< .001) and that overt problem eating behaviors and attitudes may be impacted more directly by symptoms of mood disorders rather than difficulties in emotion regulation (R2 = .190, F(4, 368) = 18.647, p< .001). Nonacceptance of emotional experience showed a significant impact on problem eating behavior above and beyond mood (R2 = .193, F(2, 370) = 44.162, p< .001; MOOD, β = .339, p< .001; nonaccept, β = .143, p = .014). The results of this study may have implications for prevention and treatment of problem eating behavior.

Self-control has been defined as the ability to override or alter an automatic response. Past research has suggested that those who are higher in the personality trait neuroticism display poorer self-control. Based on theory suggesting that self-control is a limited resource, the present study attempts to explain the relationship between neuroticism and self-control. Understanding that neuroticism is characterized by emotional instability, it follows that individuals high in neuroticism must exert more self-control in managing their negative moods, thus leaving them depleted for future acts of self-control. Participants (n = 84) completed measures of trait self-control, engaged in an emotional regulation task, and then completed measures of state self-control, affect, and rumination. Results revealed no significant effect of emotional regulation on state self-control, nor a significant effect of neuroticism on state self-control. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Obesity is a major health epidemic, impacting many people worldwide. Bariatric surgery is a common treatment for severe obesity and generally leads to improved overall health, remission of comorbid disease, and improved quality of life. Despite positive postsurgical results, many patients regain some to most of their weight following the procedure. Guidelines for presurgical psychological assessments have been developed to assist healthcare professionals in predicting outcomes for patients. Previous studies have focused on the impact of psychological illness on surgical outcomes, with mixed results. The current study aimed to assess the influence that difficulties in emotion regulation has on eating patterns in bariatric surgery patients. A total of 144 patients seeking bariatric surgery were included in the study. Results indicated no difference in severity of eating patterns among restricted, emotional, and external eating; though difficulties in emotion regulation was only significantly related to emotional (r = .427, p < .001) and external (r = .275, p < .001) eating patterns. Regression analyses indicated significant models for the impact of difficulties in emotion regulation on emotional (R2 = .254 F(5, 135) = 9.180, p < .001) and external (R2 = .094, F(5, 135) = 2.811, p = .019) eating. Specific predictors of emotional eating were discussed. Outcomes of this study highlight the importance of considering difficulties in emotion regulation in bariatric surgery patients due to the impact emotional dysregulation may have on eating patterns.

abstract: Past research has focused on the important role humor plays in interpersonal relationships; however, researchers have also identified intrapersonal applications of humor, showing that people often use humor to alleviate negative affect, and that humor has generally been found to beneficially influence mental health. The purpose of this study is to examine whether humor-based coping can be utilized as an intrapersonal tool to aid or facilitate creative thinking and problem solving when faced with a distressing situation. The current study posits reduced rumination as the mechanism by which humor facilitates creativity. To measure creativity, a task was devised that had individuals brainstorm under some distress; participants were asked to recall and describe an ongoing, unresolved problem they were facing, followed by a rumination induction, as rumination is characterized by perseverative thoughts that hinder constructive action. After the rumination induction, participants were randomly assigned to a control condition or either of two emotion regulation conditions: positive reappraisal or humor-based reappraisal. Following this, participants were asked to complete an “alternate solutions” task, based on Guilford’s Alternate Uses Task, generating solutions for their own unresolved problem. Results of the study showed that the use of humor was indeed related to a decrease in rumination, but that the humor condition did not outperform either control condition on any measure of creativity (performing worse in some cases). Limits of this study and future directions are discussed. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Psychology 2019